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The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

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Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#31

Post by zrail »

coldpie wrote: post #14
gerikson wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, that's kind of the point. When you're "webscale" you're inevitably at a level where you have to pay a lot of money just to keep the site up. Smolnet is supposed to be run from someone's basement.

My $100/year shared webhosting held up just fine to a front-page HN post. I don't think that's "a lot" a of money, though it is probably more expensive than the power usage of a small server in someone's basement.

HN traffic is honestly not that much. A recent thread puts it at between 10k and 30k visitors while you're in the top few slots, and assuming that lasts 4 hours or so is on the order of 2-5 rps, probably bursting up to 50 rps or so. Any halfway decent caching proxy is going to handle that without breaking a sweat.

Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#32

Post by the_third_wave »

gerikson wrote: post #7
elektor wrote: post #4

Looks like they’re using “smol” servers; it crashed under a few hundred HN visits ;)

To be honest, that's kind of the point. When you're "webscale" you're inevitably at a level where you have to pay a lot of money just to keep the site up. Smolnet is supposed to be run from someone's basement.

> When you're "webscale" you're inevitably at a level where you have to pay a lot of money just to keep the site up

This is true when thinking in centralised big-site terms but there are other ways to achieve a large reach, some of them already close to main-stream. Peertube [1] is an example of such, using a combination of Activitypub and peer to peer (here: bittorrent) to create a "web scale" platform without needing a lot of money. Does it work? A good question, Peertube itself certainly works fine but it would be an interesting test to see how far it actually scales.

[1] https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube

Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#33

Post by [deleted] »

Shared404 wrote: post #24
TeMPOraL wrote: post #19

What's with the sudden influx of "smol" things? Is this related to "smol" ML / "smol" AI models, and/or the HN user that (IIRC) is associated with them and likes to use the word "smol" in their comments?

'smol' is just a way of saying small that caught on in certain demographics which is starting to spread further, much like any other slang.

[deleted]

Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#34

Post by kornhole »

machrider wrote: post #26

One thing I've worried about with self-hosting small (or smol) services is that I'm responsible for securing them against attackers. Even if my circle is 15 people using a particular service, potentially thousands of malicious actors will be poking at it over the months and years I'm running it. I'm a big fan of self-hosting, especially things that I can run inside my home with no internet-facing ports. But anything…

I have been running an SBC server at home for years with many publicly available services for friends and family. To keep everything secure and easy to maintain, I use Yunohost.org which is a distribution containing most of what you need to easily install, secure, update, backup, and manage the server. It includes fail2ban and other security measures. If you or your server would be target of a persistent attacker, using VLAN's or a VPS would be a good idea. I am sure somebody will comment on some tangents to go down a rabbit hole, but I am like probably 95% of self hosters whose servers contain nothing of any value for a hacker.

Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#35

Post by marginalia_nu »

asim wrote: post #5

I like this. Speaks to my own goal of creating "micro" communities. https://micro.mu . We limit groups to 20 people. I think that's an ideal number for real connections. Need more, it's likely for a different type of communication.

I think what ruins communities is large sustained growth and not size.

Back in ye olden forum days, you'd often see cozy communities with thousands of members, most of which weren't active and a lot of them came and went. You'd see like one maybe two new members every few days.

What kills most mainstream social media is needing to show growth to investors. This turns them from a village with familiar faces into a train station where everyone is always passing through and there are no shared values or experiences.

Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#36

Post by unshavedyak »

Love this. I've been exploring (literally in the first few days) writing my own ActivityPub aggregator/client. I'm using similar motivations as this. Ie i want it to be stupidly easy to self host and allow for features that may not scale well to hundreds of thousands or millions of users.

To me that's one area where some ActivityPub implementations fail. They take not-insignificant startup costs and that friction makes it less fun to self host.

I feel like in a "fun" implementation you could spin it up on a $5/m VPS, plus a domain so if you're lean maybe $15 startup (domain + vps) with ~$6 monthly costs. That's filesystem storage with no persistent backup but rsync could get you a long way if you're trying to remain cheap. Plus the app could help you backup, offer encrypted backups to let the community help, etc.

I know i know, ActivityPub suffers for small instances. It's an area i want to explore, and explore ways to augment the spec or go around it for efficiency.

Regardless, i think we need to get more into these micro worlds. Yea, you could argue ActivityPub is not micro if it still connects everyone. I'm speaking micro in the sense of the "old web" though, where lots of independent websites formed a network of content, backlinking, etc. Tooling to embrace that, propagate, etc seems useful to me - but keeping micro also seems essential, to me.

Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#37

Post by rakoo »

bamfly wrote: post #18

Main thing I want to self-host for friends, that's not served by any of a hundred chat apps: A place to share media reviews and recommendations. Wiki-like is OK, as long as table support is great. Difficulty: it should be able to helpfully look up and create entries for any new media it encounters, using various online sources (IMDB, The Movie Database, TVDB, maybe the Musicbrainz DB, something else authoritative-ish…

Chat is a very bad flow for this, because chat is a stream, not a garden. It's made for quick feedback. What you want is closer to a wiki, but I understand you need to share it with other people and discuss about it.

I don't know of any software that does that, but the good thing is that maybe you don't need a new platform. Creating new platforms just splits the communities and is against the Unix philosophy we hold dear. Maybe a good first step is to be in the Fediverse, and create an actor per entry. That actor would contain all facts, potentially linking other entries. Anyone could @ movies, so you'd see the discussion about them. You can create lists, like "watched/listened/played/read" and add actors to those lists. Those actors don't post anything, they're just a "rallying point" for conversation. They're more encompassing than hashtags.

Sounds like a weekend project for someone adventurous enough

Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#38

Post by tech_ken »

asim wrote: post #5

I like this. Speaks to my own goal of creating "micro" communities. https://micro.mu . We limit groups to 20 people. I think that's an ideal number for real connections. Need more, it's likely for a different type of communication.

This is a cool idea and a nice looking implementation. I have a Signal group chat that I've been trying to find a slightly better home for, one feature I think we desperately need is a community calendar; some way that we can create and coordinate big group events beyond just spinning off an invitee chat or something. I see that you call out event-focused groups here, is there any tooling that would support actually planning the events and seeing what's happening over a short time period?

Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#39

Post by asim »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #35
asim wrote: post #5

I like this. Speaks to my own goal of creating "micro" communities. https://micro.mu . We limit groups to 20 people. I think that's an ideal number for real connections. Need more, it's likely for a different type of communication.

I think what ruins communities is large sustained growth and not size. Back in ye olden forum days, you'd often see cozy communities with thousands of members, most of which weren't active and a lot of them came and went. You'd see like one maybe two new members every few days. What kills most mainstream social media is needing to show growth to investors. This turns them from a village with familiar faces into a tra…

That's good insight and similar to my own experiences. I spent time on various forums in the late 90s and early 00s. It was a golden experience and I got to know a lot of the members there. You had the usual suspects chatting amongst all the lurkers. The model was far superior to the type chat systems were using today to build similar communities.

I did the VC funded thing and personally don't want to go back to it. I also don't really care about the high growth thing but being sustainable is important. Sustained growth and profitability at least means the thing can be around for a while. I also think it comes down to the values of the creators of any platform. At what point are they going to sell out and why. That really irks me now. Like everything is in the service of wealth creation as opposed to real value. I think the only way to mitigate that is structure the project and team in a way to support it. So if you get on the VC hamster wheel, there's no path but hyper growth. If you go against it and say, run a really normal business or even a social enterprise (aka non profit), maybe it actually benefits the people it's in service of.

Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#40

Post by ajani »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #35
asim wrote: post #5

I like this. Speaks to my own goal of creating "micro" communities. https://micro.mu . We limit groups to 20 people. I think that's an ideal number for real connections. Need more, it's likely for a different type of communication.

I think what ruins communities is large sustained growth and not size. Back in ye olden forum days, you'd often see cozy communities with thousands of members, most of which weren't active and a lot of them came and went. You'd see like one maybe two new members every few days. What kills most mainstream social media is needing to show growth to investors. This turns them from a village with familiar faces into a tra…

In ye olden days the whole world didn’t exist. Maps indicated ‘here be dragons’.

I feel you though, marginalia, and appreciate your work. I wrote a search engine too once and after a few months of me not using it myself, gave up. My results were too specific and not broad enough to include the world.

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